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by Reading Redhead (readingredhead)



Category: Bones
Genre: Community: comment_fic, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-26
Updated: 2010-05-26
Packaged: 2017-10-09 17:50:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readingredhead/pseuds/Reading%20Redhead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was never the one to feel homesick before, but as much as she loves what she's doing here thousands of miles away from murder and fear and the Jeffersonian, the Maluku Islands can't be home - too many of her favorite people are missing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home

**Author's Note:**

> Written for x_shorty1013_x on the comment_fic LJ community.

She was never the one to feel homesick before. "Homesick" implied a home to which one wanted to return, and though she'd been through so many houses in her life, the real homes had been few and far between. She'd been starting to think that her flat in DC was a home - a place for everything and everything in its place - but now she knows it's just another one of the many places she came back to at the end of the day, looking for little more than a place to rest her head.

Now, she rests it in a tent pitched in the shadow of an active volcano in the midst of a tropical forest. Now, she knows that comfort, while favorable when available, is not a necessity. She's done this sort of thing before, and the excitement of discovery runs so high (even if she doesn't always show it) that the discomfort of escaping civilization is little more than a minor inconvenience. The air here is rich with the smell of spices, thick with moisture more often than not, and sometimes when she's far from the excavation site and no one's looking she stoops down and gathers a handful of soil, just to feel it slide between her ungloved fingers. She doesn't get much sleep, that's not new - but instead of being kept awake by fear and anger and pain, kept in the lab to solve one more case and track down one more killer, she's so immersed in uncovering the secrets of humanity's past that if she sleeps she's afraid she'll miss something.

And she does miss things in sleep, in flashes - the _swish-beep_ sound her card key made when she swiped in, glass and steel industrial architecture, rows and rows of bones all clean and bared of flesh, the disinfectant tang that was her only partner for many years of late night shifts - but then she wakes up and brushes it aside like she swats away the insects that always get in past the netting. She has a job to do.

But she had a job to do there, too - and she's only just beginning to realize it was more than that. Because while she only sees the lab when she's asleep, the team that made it her home are constant waking presences. One day it's a smile at the thought that Hodgins would share her liking for the soil that everyone else complains about getting stuck beneath their fingers. The next, they uncover a skull - a real humanoid skull! and she gets to hold it! - and in the heart of her excitement is the thought of what Angela and her computer could do to transform this brittle bone into living flesh. On her first day, she caught herself psychoanalyzing her new colleagues with a method frighteningly akin to Sweets's. Just yesterday, she overheard one of her scientists recording a message for her daughter back home and she couldn't help but think of Cam and wonder how she's doing without her team.

Every day, she thinks about Booth, in the most incongruous situations, and she's starting to think some of his religious illogic must have rubbed off on her over the years, because each time the thoughts get closer and closer to being prayers - to keep him safe, to keep him sane, and mostly just to bring him _home_.

She's still not sure what exactly "home" means to her, but she's all about logic, and it can't be a coincidence that whenever she thinks about him, that word's never far behind.


End file.
